As with any other sport, becoming a good basketball player takes a huge amount of hard work, dedication and perseverance. Of course, it’s not as simple as just spending every day working on your shooting skills, as there is a lot more to basketball than just tossing a ball through a hoop. With this in mind, here are six ways to boost your skills and hopefully become a better basketball player.

Sweat Your Way to Success

If you want to become a better basketball player, you have to be ready and willing to work for it. This means spending countless hours in the gym and on the court to continually improve your physical fitness and skills. A basketball academy or camp will only take you so far. No amount of skills training will matter if you’re not willing to put in the time and work to actually practice what you’ve learned and improve yourself.

Pay Attention to the Mental Side of the Game

The physical side of the game is only one part of the equation. You’ve got to be mentally tough in order to have a chance of making it. This means not letting yourself get discouraged by a bad game or unfair calls and also being mentally prepared to stay calm, cool and collected under pressure. In short, focusing on the mental side of the game will allow you to become someone that your teammates know they can rely on when the going gets tough.

Skills Training Is Key

When we said, ‘Sweat your way to success,’ we weren’t discounting the huge benefit that basketball training camps can provide. Through these training camps, you will learn a huge number of new exercises, skills and ways of training yourself to become a better player, both physically and mentally. The fact that many training camps are taught by successful players and coaches means that campers have a great opportunity to learn from people who know exactly what it takes. In this way, they can prove to be an invaluable tool in your effort to improve your skills and become a better basketball player.

Test Yourself Against the Best

As the old saying goes, ‘practice makes perfect.’ However, practice can still only take you so far.

No matter what position you play, it’s important that you work to become as complete of a player as possible. This means spending as much time working on your weaknesses as on your strengths, maybe even more. It also means knowing how to take criticism and using it to drive yourself to improve, instead of letting it get you down. No basketball player will ever be great at everything, but it’s still important that you try to focus on becoming a well-rounded of a player as you can.

Yoga for Improved Strength, Flexibility and Mental Toughness

Yoga is becoming extremely popular among a huge range of different professional athletes. The truth is that yoga is far more difficult and rewarding than most people think and it can provide a huge boost to your overall strength, flexibility, self-awareness and mental toughness. In fact, Coach Steve Kerr credits yoga for some of the success that his Golden State Warriors team has experienced in recent years. Although you may be hesitant to try it, there is absolutely no doubt that yoga can provide some huge benefits to your overall game.

The same thing is true for basketball as for virtually everything else in life: If you want to become better, you need to spend a huge amount of time focusing on improving yourself. While there is no guarantee that any amount of hard work will ensure that you make the team or enable you to go pro, the only way to find out is to set yourself a goal and do everything you can to work towards it.